Chapter 1: The clockmender's nephew throws with the wrong hand

The Clock Gallery runs along the top of the Long Hall like a balcony in an old theatre. Its iron rail is worn silver where a century of elbows has leaned on it. Behind the rail, in the last shop before the stairs, forty clocks hang on one wall, and every one of them is ticking.

They do not tick together. Long-case clocks, kitchen clocks, a carved cuckoo, a railway clock with a cracked face: each keeps its own little beat, and when the hour comes they strike one after another, like a team passing the ball along a line, until the last tiny chime finishes a full half-minute late.

The lamp you saw at dawn belongs to this shop. So does the young man. By ten o'clock you have your answer, from Mrs. Odile Fenn, who has it from everyone. He is, everyone says, Douglas Hale, nephew of the old clockmender, Ambrose Hale, and he is minding the shop while his uncle has his eyes mended in hospital.

“Ambrose wrote to him,” Mrs. Fenn says, pouring your tea. “Fifteen years since the boy was last here. He was ten, all knees and freckles. Now look at him, up at six winding every clock, polite as a bishop.”

First: A nephew nobody had seen for fifteen years

Ambrose will be away for three weeks, and after that he goes to his sister's by the sea to rest his eyes. There is no telephone at the sister's house. Nobody at the market has heard his voice since he left.

In the meantime the nephew has been busy. Watches come up the gallery stairs all day, and he takes every one in for repair. He also asks for the money in advance. A new rule of his uncle's, he explains, very sorry, the times being what they are.

For forty years Ambrose has kept a slate by his door. He chalks on it the day each watch will be ready, and he takes your money only when you have held the mended watch to your ear and heard it tick. Half the market has stood at that slate. Nobody remembers it being wiped clean before.

Dorn sips her tea and says nothing. Then she says one thing. “Ambrose has never taken a penny before a job was done in forty years.”

Second: The darts team on the café wall

Over the café's dartboard hangs a frame, brown at the edges. It shows the Old Market darts team on the day it won the cup, fifteen summers ago, lined up outside this very door. Ambrose is in the middle with a small boy on his shoulders.

The boy is holding up a dart in his left hand, high, like a trophy. His tongue is out. His freckles show even in the faded print.

“That's Douglas,” Mrs. Fenn says. “Threw with his left and beat Pim in the final, three darts to spare. Pim has never forgiven him.”

Pim, at the counter with his soup, does not deny it. He laughs instead, and tells you something else. Every summer evening the boy rang the closing bell. He was too short to reach the rope, so Pim lifted him by the belt of his shorts, and the boy hung there and pulled with both hands.

“Best ringer I ever had,” Pim says. “Never missed a stroke. Ambrose used to stand by the iron post and count them out loud.”

Third: Repair tickets written in a hurry

That afternoon you climb the gallery stairs behind Agnes Dewhurst, who carries her grandfather's silver pocket watch wrapped in a handkerchief. She has wanted it cleaned for years. Now that the market is closing, she says, she wants it done here, by Ambrose's shop, or not at all.

The nephew is charming. He opens the watch, admires it, names its maker, and writes a ticket with his right hand, quick and neat. He takes Agnes's money, puts it in a drawer and puts the watch in another. Then he smiles at you, and talks.

He knows that the railway clock came from the old goods yard, that the cuckoo has not cuckooed since the flood in the cellars, and that his uncle takes three sugars and pretends to take two.

“You'll know my uncle, Sergeant? Grand old man. I spent every summer up here as a boy. He never let me near the market bell, mind you. Said Pim would box my ears if I touched his rope.”

Dorn, behind you, is reading the clock faces as if they were a book. On the way down she gives you her list.

Check the hands. People can change their hair, their voice and their name, but they keep the hand they were born to use.

Check the old stories. Everyone who grew up somewhere carries the place's memories with them, and they cannot be learned in a week.

Check the money. An honest stand-in keeps the old rules; a hurried one makes new rules that bring cash in first.

Check who could speak up. A man with bandaged eyes and no telephone cannot say, “That is not my nephew.”

At six, after closing, the young man comes down to the café for his supper. Mrs. Fenn hands him three darts for old times' sake. He grins, stands at the line, and throws all three with his right hand. Two of them hit the wall. Mrs. Fenn laughs and calls him rusty. Pim, at the counter, puts down his spoon and does not laugh at all.

Stop here and think. Is the young man in the Clock Gallery Ambrose Hale's nephew?

Fourth: The first way, by the hand that holds the dart

The photograph is your witness. At ten, Douglas Hale held his dart in his left hand and beat the market's best player with it. Children are sometimes made to write with the hand their teachers like better, but nobody forces a boy to win a darts final with the wrong hand.

The young man in the shop writes with his right hand. That alone proves little. But at the café he threw with his right hand, and threw badly, not like a man whose left arm once won a cup and who is simply out of practice. A left-handed thrower who tries the right hand looks just as clumsy, but he does not choose it in the first place.

Faces, by contrast, are poor witnesses after fifteen years. Freckles fade, knees stop being knobbly, a boy's round cheeks turn into a man's. That is exactly why somebody chose this shop, this nephew and this winter, when the only man who could tell the difference is lying in a dark ward with his eyes covered.

So the hand says no. The man upstairs is not the boy in the photograph.

Fifth: The second way, by Pim's bell rope

Now put the photograph away and listen. Pim remembers the nephew ringing the closing bell every summer evening, lifted by his belt, with Ambrose counting the strokes beside the iron post.

The young man says his uncle never let him near the bell. Fifteen years can blur a face. They do not turn the proudest memory of a boy's summer upside down.

A real nephew might forget the name of the soup; he would not forget hanging from that rope, with the whole Long Hall looking up and his uncle's voice counting below. Pim's own face, when the young man's words are repeated to him, says exactly the same thing.

The young man knew a great deal about the shop. Somebody had told him stories. But stories told second-hand are like a tennis match described over the telephone: you get the score, and you miss the way the ball actually bounced.

Two roads, one answer. The darts photograph and the bell rope agree: the man winding Ambrose's clocks is somebody else.

Sixth: Every watch goes back to its owner

Dorn telephones the lodging house written on the envelope of Ambrose's letter, which the young man left on the counter. The landlady is cheerful. Douglas Hale is at sea until March, she says. His friend Barnaby Croft, who shared his room, took Douglas's post with him when he left a week ago.

Barnaby Croft does not argue for long. He looks at Dorn the way a chess player looks at a board on which he has just noticed, too late, a quiet bishop waiting at the far corner.

Douglas told him all about the market on long evenings, the shop, the clocks, the café, the cup; he never told him about the bell. The drawers upstairs hold eleven watches and every coin of the advance money, tied up neatly in a bag for a Saturday train.

Agnes gets her grandfather's watch back that same evening. Ambrose, when he hears, laughs until his bandages slip, and sends word that his real nephew may ring Pim's bell as soon as his ship comes home.

On your way back down the gallery stairs, you pass a fishmonger in a yellow oilskin climbing up, smelling of ice, nodding to you. At the bottom you look across the Fish Hall, and there he is again behind his ice, in the same yellow oilskin, weighing a cod. And how could the fishmonger climbing the stairs behind you be standing, at that same moment, behind his stall in the Fish Hall?